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Présentation de la chanson dans l’application Biophilia

From the curious structures of children’s home-grown crystal gardens to the translucent beauty of enormous columns of gypsum in mexico’s "Crystal Cave", crystal formations embody processes of growth and change of state. Crystalline connects spatial relationships in nature and music, and uses them to represent emotional states.

Crystalline reflects bjork’s spatial experience of verse-chorus form, and this spatial analogy is used in the app as a tool for learning about song structure. The verses are confined melodically, harmonically and rhythmically, coinciding with the narrow tunnels of the app. In the chorus the music opens up, shifts to a more danceable metro, the lyrics change from internal to external, and the app changes from tunnel to space.

These are moments of emotional climax and change of state - from solid to gas, from crystal to nebula, from inside the earth to outside in space, from emotional rigidity ("anxiety") to openness to others ("sparkle"). They are also the reward for the correct solution to the app"puzzle".

Björk"s lyrics connect the central themes of Biophilia, and unite different types and scale of natural phenomena : animal and mineral worlds are juxtaposed , physical space is enclosed or opened, and scale encompasses the atomic, human and stellar.

Analyse de Nikki Dibben

"I’ve sat a lot of my life in buses and taxis from 20 years of touring and somehow all these different types of intersections have gone on file in my brain. Like some have three streets meeting with very tall buildings on all sides while others are complex with like five street meeting but all buildings are low and so on… Seems like each one of the has a different mood, different spatial tension or release. Part of my obsessive nature wants to map out each intersection in the world and match it with a song… To me crystal structures seem to grow in a similar way."
— Björk

Crystalline structures are formed by the separation of liquids and solids, as when diamonds are formed during the slow cooling of molten rock, or when salt crystals remain after water evaporates from a salt solution. Just as crystals attract one another, locking together to form larger structures, so too songs consist of sections which fit together.

The lyrics of Crystalline tells us to listen to "listen how they grow, listen how they glow" — a clue that Björk’s ideas about crystal formations can be found in the music itself. It’s these "spacial" relationships in music which the app and animation play with.

At the level of small-scale musical structure, the metallic hammering of the gameleste evokes confined, claustrophobic surroundings, it’s the sound of rigid crystals, the narrow tunnels in the app. The dense matrix of notes in the animation resembling bonded atoms in a crystal lattice.

For Björk the song is the chiseling at the solidified face of her (and our) stagnated heart. Just as crystalline structures are based on regular repeating lower-order structures "polygons", "octagons") so the grouping of the 17 notes is broken into repetitions of smaller units.

At the level of large-scale structure, crystalline uses a contrasting verse-chorus form to juxtapose feelings of confinement with those of spaciousness — a characteristic which Björk had noted in a lot of rock and pop songs using verse-chorus form. The app allows you to find your own route through the song by changing the order in which sections are heard, and in doing so lets you learn about how the different sections function. This isn’t the only way of using sections to create a piece of music : in a "medley" different units follow each other (abcd) ; binary form uses two sections (ab) ; rondo alternates repast of one sections with others (abacada) ; in ternary form the first section repeats (abs), which is related to the 32-bar song form common in pop and rock. An example of a more through-composed structure, rare in pop and rock is Björk’s track "Sun in my Mouth" from Vespertine.

There’s a curious difference in the way we perceive structure at various levels of musical organization. Form in songs depends on repetitions and differences at multiple levels of musical organization : The musical ’phrase’ (often corresponding to a sentence in the lyrics), a group of phrases (which might be a verse of lyrics), up to the level of the whole song. As groups become longer (for instance the verse rather than the phrase within the verse) we perceive form instead of hearing rhythm. This shift happens when the duration of the section is longer than the "psychological present" — the short period of time (between 2 to 7 seconds) in which we can directly perceive a relationship between events without calling on memory. So musical form can be found at various levels but feels different because it uses different perceptual processes.

Crystalline juxtaposes musical-physical confinement and freedom, using them as the basis for a musical game, and reflecting björk’s spatial experience of song form.

La presse à propos du titre

Much of the discussion of Björk’s forthcoming Biophilia is likely to focus in on its forward-thinking release pattern : Each track will be issued as an app tailored for the iPad. Such tinkering won’t be a surprise to longstanding Björk watchers, but "Crystalline", the first track to be released from this new project, may raise a few eyebrows. Björk spends the predominant part of the song emoting over the kind of jagged-edge electronics she produced during the Homogenic era almost 15 years ago. It’s not often that she harks back to the past in this way, but it initially feels like a comforting spot to return to in order to ease her audience into Biophilia.

The song is built around a loop of flickering percussion, which sounds like someone lightly tapped on a glass with a spoon then digitally processed the results to turn up the brightness. An undertow of halting beats gathers as the song progresses, while the spare backing allows Björk’s vocals to rocket to the moon and back via a lyrical conceit that intertwines the process of crystal formation and blooming human relationships. That comfort-zone emoting on "Crystalline" works brilliantly at conjuring up a false sense of security, as its final act masterfully deconstructs everything that went before it by introducing the kind of faltering drum and bass rhythms that Squarepusher and Venetian Snares commonly practice. It makes this a wonderfully confounding teaser for Biophilia, leaving the possible worlds it explores wide open to suggestion.

Cue "Crystalline," the first proper single in three years from the only artist on the planet who introduces a new album with a song about the geometric substructures of sound waves (I think). Consider it this Björkophile’s pleasure to announce that we can finally call the music the most exciting thing about an upcoming Björk project, a fact that owes almost entirely to the track’s final minute. For most of its runtime, "Crystalline" is a comfortable, even conservative entry in the Icelandic singer’s repertoire : The interplay of synthetic drum beats, bells, and glassy percussive textures suggests a cleaner Vespertine, while Björk’s elliptical vocal melody (main hook : "Crystal-line in-ter-nal neb-u-laaaaa") wouldn’t sound out of place on Medúlla. It’s not like Björk to play safe in the sonic sandbox, but after 2007’s underwhelming and uncharacteristically earthbound Volta, a self-conscious return-to-form(lessness) is hardly unwelcome. For the most part, "Crystaline" sounds like it was engineered to have fans sighing, "Good to have you back."

"Crystalline" climaxes with a dramatic percussion break that counts immediately among the most visceral moments in the Björk canon, abruptly shifting from placid abstraction to the kind of liminal sonics broached on "Pluto" and "Declare Independence." The distorted torpor underlies the track’s heavier beats, then threatens to overtake "Crystalline" entirely, while Björk, still poised, sings about conquering anxiety. In a minute’s time we’ve moved from an ordered cosmos to entropy, from Aristotelian physics to chaos theory. And suddenly I’m anticipating an album that only a week ago sounded like a rejected Smithsonian exhibit. It really is good to have her back.